Copyright (c) 2013 Macalester College All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors Recent documents in Honors Projects en-us Wed, 22 May 2013 01:42:17 PDT 3600 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/12 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/12 Tue, 21 May 2013 10:41:00 PDT “Earthless” is a composition in 5 movements for a mixed chamber ensemble. The piece is loosely programatic and draws its “narrative” from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Tibetan Buddhist Text that gives instructions on how to traverse the space between death and rebirth. Rather than telling a direct narrative, each movement is designed to give a broad impression of the different aspects of the experience between death and life through the combination of text and music. The text is taken from poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sir Walter Scott and Sara Teasdale and compiled in an original “libretto” with the intention of reflecting the internal experience of the deceased person.

]]> Samuel P. Tygiel http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/11 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/11 Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:15:43 PDT The female protagonist’s mad scene, since coming into true vogue in the early nineteenth-century Italian opera tradition, has been prized for its dramatic and poignant emotive qualities. This project explores four nineteenth-century mad scenes; Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), Bellini’s I Puritani (1835), Meyerbeer’s Dinorah (1859), and Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), surveying the literature of each scene and providing formal analysis of musical attributes such as harmony, melodic structure, and formal design, all in comparison to generic operatic conventions. Musical elements generally associated with the operatic madwoman include the orchestral recollection of significant past themes, virtuosic coloratura lines, and the presence of imagined voices, all of which serve to propel her into an alternate realm of happiness, escape, and, arguably, potential liberation from social and musical confines. In interpreting compositional choices in these scenes, I pay special attention to the Kantian dichotomy of phenomenal and noumenal realms (i.e., our perceived reality versus the "thing in itself", an entity in its true form, which cannot be perceived by human senses), as discussed by Gary Tomlinson in his book Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (1999). Analyses of these scenes enable us to determine how composers and society observed and portrayed the madwoman, her fervid personality, and distinctive power.

]]> Claire Biringer http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/10 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/10 Wed, 25 May 2011 15:07:50 PDT In this honors thesis, I examine the ways in which Ghanaian highlife, a 20^th century hybrid popular music style, is in dialogue with Ghana’s own traditional music and culture, what scholar John Collins describes as a “continuity with traditional life.” Arguing against conceptions of highlife music as “simplified” or “pidgin,” I suggest that there is a fluid relationship between Ghana’s traditional music and its highlife. The socio-cultural/musical elements of traditional music appear in highlife through indigenous instruments, melodies, rhythms, storytelling forms, and other thematic material. At once, traditional music exists as a resource from which popular musicians may strategically draw inspiration.

]]> William Matczynski http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/9 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/9 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:49:12 PST This comparative analysis of three twentieth-century operas - Berg's Wozzeck, Britten's Peter Grimes, and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District - traces their respective discourses of gender and madness, specifically within the dramatization (musical and otherwise) of their title characters. Of the three, Wozzeck, because it adheres to strict gender roles, has been received most uniformly as a tragedy; by contrast Lady Macbeth is traditionally viewed in terms of satire. I argue that feminist musicological analysis allows for a re-envisioning of all three operas, in which the characters are received as tragic regardless of subverting societally enforced gender categories.

]]> Caolfionn Bhreidé Yenney http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/8 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/8 Wed, 02 Dec 2009 06:43:12 PST Drake Andersen http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/7 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/7 Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:42:00 PDT Fifth Wheel is a composition written for Macalester's jazz band that uses form and extended tonality to create an emotional narrative. It contains elements of both classical and jazz traditions: its form and unusual meter (5/4) from the former and improvisation and jazz harmony from the latter. Writing harmonies in an extended tonal language was of particular importance in this piece's creation.

]]> Ian C. Boswell http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/6 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/6 Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:40:02 PDT Daniel Pickens-Jones http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/5 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/5 Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:57:10 PDT The composer Maurice Ravel described his three-song cycle Chansons madécasses as containing "a new element, dramatic -- indeed erotic, resulting from the subject matter of [Evariste] Parny's poems." This paper explores the disparate and sometimes conflicting 'voices' -- of cultures, of instruments, of ideologies – arising from the depictions of exoticism, racial violence, gender and sexuality within both music and text. These 'voices' and the conflicts of which they speak are also examined in the context of Ravel's overall oeuvre, with an emphasis on his career-long preoccupation with the exotic in art.

]]> Anna M. Sutheim http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/4 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/4 Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:56:05 PDT Singer-songwriter Aimee Mann has been creating music, both as a solo artist and as a former member of the band 'Til Tuesday, for the past twenty years. In general, musicological and cultural-critical reception of her work has proceeded along traditional lines of inquiry applied to countless female artists, viewing her work in terms of the representation of gender issues. This study, however, aims to treat Mann's music from a more broadly aesthetic perspective, examining such details as text painting, instrumentation, and harmonic language in an effort to identify the unique elements of her artistry.

]]> Amy M. Coddington http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/3 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/3 Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:07:27 PDT Josh Whitney-Wise http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/2 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/2 Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:35:44 PDT Anh Trinh http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/1 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/musi_honors/1 Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:00:48 PDT Luis Mesa Martinez